Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans

Given how common the practice of slavery was in centuries and millennia past, and how recently the last living ancestor of all now-living humans plausibly walked the earth ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842 ), it is trivial to argue that ~99.9% of now-living humans had many slave-owning direct ancestors. (And that any exceptions would both occur in tiny / very isolated / marginalized minority populations, and be utterly unverifiable.) So - why the current obsession with the subject? My sense is that identifying & denouncing anything tied to slavery is a current fad among social groups who waste far too much time practicing & posturing over ideology. And, with how sh*tty the future is looking for the younger generations now, anything that lets them denounce older people is probably extra-attractive.

This article has 6 citations - not very much impact. A similar but more widely referenced one is this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842

Not sure what you mean exactly by "generative models" but it reminds me of Rohde et al 2004 (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842) which is all about modelling this sort of thing. In fact, some of the results of Rohde's paper are quantitative things which Rohde et al discovered by simulation and which my paper provides theoretical explanation for (see my paper's Proposition 6 and the last sentence of the abstract of Rohde et al).